I. His Ruling Ideas from The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“He even thought that men might be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus, she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Shelley compares the flowing through our mind of ‘the universe of things,’ which are, he has explained elsewhere, but thoughts, to the flowing of the Arne through the ravine, and compares the unknown sources of our thoughts in some ‘remoter world’ whose ‘gleams’ ‘visit the soul in sleep,’ to Arne’s sources among the glaciers on the mountain heights.”
  2. “When he describes the Moon as part of some beautiful scene he can call her beautiful, but when he personifies, when his words come under the influence of that great memory or of some mysterious tide in the depth of our being, he grows unfriendly or not truly friendly or at the most pitiful.”
  3. “Any one who has any experience of any mystical state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound symbols, whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the dream that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for years.”
  4. “she passes along the Nile ‘by Moeris and the Mareotid lakes,’ and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters in shadows that ‘never are erased but tremble ever’; and in many a dark and subterranean street under the Nile–new caverns–and along the bank of the Nile; and as she bends over the unhappy, she compares unhappiness to ‘the strife that stirs the liquid surface of man’s life’; and because she can see the reality of things she is described as journeying ‘in the calm depths’ of ‘the wide lake’ we journey over unpiloted.”
  5. “I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know”